Food Trends: Spice up your next cookout with this homemade condiment

Playing Ketchup

Ketchup would seem to be a reliable culinary class/taste litmus test. Many elitists think it’s a measure of good sense: People who use it a lot don’t have any.

Some boutique burger places don’t even have it on hand, and plenty of snooty hot dog stands scoff at those who wish to sully a frankfurter with tomato ketchup. Still, many restaurants tout their “house-made” artisanal ketchup. These days, as with any once-vilified culinary item — corndogs, poutine, Twinkies — you can find some contrarian taste-maker who’s championed the much-maligned product, even attempting to rehabilitate its reputation.

But ketchup’s different. It’s not as if it needs a PR campaign, at least not in America. It’s the ubiquitous condiment. Many recall when ketchup was proposed for consideration as a “vegetable” in the nation’s school cafeterias. There may be people who make meatloaf without ketchup, but I’ve never met them. And many a solid barbecue sauce has ketchup as its base. Then there’s cocktail sauce, which generally calls for ketchup.

People from around the world — those who don’t hate the stuff, at least — have figured out how to do some interesting things with the sauce. Ketchup, for instance, is central to Taiwanese refried rice.

Whatever your feelings about ketchup, you’re probably fairly cemented in your ways, and it’s likely a difficult challenge to think of ketchup as a new versatile taste, to approach it as any other ingredient in the kitchen. For many, the super sweet and sticky sauce is just too overpowering.

One way to taste ketchup with fresh taste buds, however, is to try making it yourself. It’s very easy, and you can vary it a million ways. Once you start toying with different ingredients — adding a little more of a different kind of vinegar, or tweaking it with more paprika or hot pepper, or maybe mixing in some mustard seeds — you can see that ketchup isn’t that much different from chutney or salsa or sriracha.

As it happens, ketchup has plenty in common with those sauces, particularly in its hot-sour-funky potential, and its multicultural origins. Ketchup, the word and the sauce, evidently comes from China. And its Chinese name ke-tsiap refers to fermented fish sauce. How it came to be a sweet tomato paste that typifies American eating habits is a story of commerce and colonialism. Dutch and English traders acquired a taste for the stuff when bartering with Chinese merchants in Indonesia during the 17th and 18th century, the story goes.

And soon Europeanized recipes for ke-tsiap were showing up in American cookbooks and elsewhere, adding twists such as shallots and mushrooms as the central ingredients. Fish sauce is sweet and tangy, and fans of the stuff know that it adds zing to all kinds of dishes. But if you break a bottle of fish sauce out at your next cookout, odds are it will go untouched.

But since it is high season for backyard barbecues, you can trot out some homemade ketchups as a way of squirting a little zip into the standard routine of burgers and hot dogs. The ketchup that we’ve come to know from dunking our french fries in it is made with tomato paste, vinegar, sugar and spices. You cook it down until it gets to that nice gloppy consistency. You can make chunky ketchups, or ketchups with fresh tomatoes, but I mostly went for something that was loosely recognizable as a relative of what oozes out of a Heinz bottle.

I started with something that looked a little like tomato soup and then let it get thicker and thicker on the stove, over an hour or so at a simmer. Then I split that up into three batches, one sort of plain, one with mustard seeds, black pepper and malt vinegar added, and another with chipotle pepper sauce and cider vinegar added. All three are tangy and sweet, maybe not as sweet as the ketchup you buy at the store. (I used brown sugar and a little molasses as the sweetener, recipes that try to approximate the flavor of store-bought ketchup tend to use corn syrup). I like the ketchups that spotlight the flavor of the tomato paste and the puckery stab of vinegar. But tasting these concoctions does make it clear how conditioned many of our palates have become to the sort of numbing warmth of the corn syrup sweetness in most ketchups. If the experiment of making your own ketchup nudges you to think twice about what flavors you want ketchup to actually deliver, then the effort is probably a worthwhile one.

Since ketchup and mustard are sort of like the Yankees and Red Sox of the condiment cosmos, mixing the two might seem like an unacceptable violation of the order of things, but I found that my batch of ketchup with mustard seeds and malt vinegar was a success. It wasn’t so much that it tasted anything like mustard, though there was perhaps a little more of that vapory bite and edge to it. The real appeal was the suggestion of texture and crunch that the mustard seeds provided. This could make for an interesting meat loaf. And it certainly would be at home on a hot dog.

My chipotle ketchup had its own charms. The smoky flavor and layer of pepper complicated the tastes, bringing in hints of bacon and heat. As someone who routinely splashes vinegar hot sauce on my french fries and fried fish, the chipotle ketchup will make a nice condiment for fried potatoes, particularly sweet potato fries.

One added possible benefit of making your own ketchup: you can use tomatoes that aren’t packaged in cans with a BPA lining, and you can store it in glass jars, if plastics leaching into your tomato products have become something you worry about. If nothing else, your homemade tomato ketchup will make for interesting conversation at your next neighborhood barbecue.

Photo: GettyImages/Foodcollection RF

Homemade Ketchup

2 (6-ounce) cans tomato paste

1/2 cup white vinegar

4 tablespoons brown sugar

1 tablespoon garlic powder

1 tablespoon onion powder

1/4 teaspoon allspice

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons molasses

2 1/2 cups water

method

Stir together and simmer for two hours or until thick. Add to and augment the recipe according to taste.